Bully Prevention

Children who bully:¹

• May witness physical and verbal violence or aggression at home. They have a positive view of this behavior, and they act aggressively toward other people, including adults.
• May hit or push other children.
• Are often physically strong.
• May or may not be popular with other children around their same age.
• Have trouble following rules.
• Show little concern for the feelings of others.

Many bullies think highly of themselves. They like being looked up to. And they often expect everyone to behave according to their wishes. Children who bully are often not taught to think about how their actions make other people feel.

Children who bully are at risk for school failure and dropout and for committing criminal acts later in life.¹ They also are more likely to use drugs more than children who don’t bully.²

Some children both bully others and are bullied. They may have been bullied and then lash out at others. Children who are both bullies and victims use alcohol and/or carry a weapon more than children not affected by bullying.²

Bullying behavior is a “red flag” that a child has not learned to control his or her aggression. A child who bullies needs counseling to learn healthy ways to interact with people. Professional counseling can guide a child through discovering why bullying is hurtful. Through this process, a counselor can encourage a child to develop empathy, which is being sensitive to and understanding the feelings of others. In some cases, follow-up counseling may involve the parent. Family counseling has been shown to help reduce anger and improve interpersonal relationships in boys who bully.

Most kids have bullied or been bullied in school, but this doesn?t mean it should be condoned.

Extreme cases of bullying are known to trigger depression and social isolation and even to lead to suicide, according to researchers.

Several recent studies on bullying come to similar conclusions. First, boys bully more than girls; students who like school are often targets of bullying; and bullying can lead to irritation, anger and violence.

Researchers in Finland looked at 16,410 adolescents in secondary schools in two regions and found an increased prevalence of depression and suicidal thoughts among both those who bully and those who do the bullying. About one in 10 of the youngsters between ages 14-16 reported being bullied weekly at school.

Those youngsters at most risk of depression and suicide were those who were both a bully and got bullied, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. The researchers say psychiatric intervention should be considered for students who get pushed around as well as the bullies themselves.

Students who are frequently bullied can have difficulty sleeping, get headaches and abdominal pains and suffer other behavioral symptoms, including depression. The act of persistent bullying, on the other hand, is often associated with delinquency in adulthood.

Australian researchers say 23.7 percent of students in New South Wales Schools report bullying other students; 12.7 percent say they were bullied and 21.5 percent say they were both bullied and have bullied others. The rest, 49.4 percent, say they didn?t bully and weren?t bullied.

This study, also published in the British Medical Journal, says bullies tended to be unhappy in school and engage in behaviors that compromise their health, such as smoking or alcohol use. Those bullied, on the other hand, often had poor mental health and psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches and irritability.

A separate study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that the greater a student?s anger, the more bullying the student does. The CDC report, done at a suburban Indiana middle school, also says that 81 percent of students admitted they had bullied a classmate in the last month.

Those who are bullied can also explode, the researchers say. For example, the students who shot and killed classmates at Columbine High School were teased mercilessly. This doesn?t justify what they did, but it?s an example of how bullying can lead to violence.

If your kid is being bullied, it?s best to try to nip it in the bud if possible by talking to teachers or school officials. This should be done after school and when other classmates won?t notice. Early intervention is important because chronic bullying can lead to depression and withdrawal.

Every parent has probably run into one side or the other of the bullying problem. It?s not an easy issue to deal with but it?s important to be aware of your child?s feelings and emotions when it comes to their relationships with others.

Source: British Medical Journal, August 7, 1999.

Camp Might Be Different Than You Remember…

With the arrival of summer, camp season has officially begun! Across the country, parents have begun to pack bags, fill out forms and sew on name tags in preparation for this beloved rite of passage for their kids.
But the question remains: Although summer camp is typically a time in which boys and girls learn to step out from under the watchful gaze of their parents and celebrate a new kind of independence, how do parents protect their children from being bullied when they are so far away from home?

That’s the question I asked Dr. Joel Haber, an anti-bully coach and consultant for the American Camp Association. Dr. Haber has more than 20 years of experience in lending a hand to kids, families, schools, camps and other organizations; and when it comes to bullying, he recommends five crucial safeguards:
Become informed: Be proactive in learning about the camp’s bully-prevention policy. Request to see any literature the camp may have produced, and then go beyond that. Ask about staff training — in detail. Do counselors know how to spot vulnerable kids? Do they know how to identify the bullies? Are they trained to recognize exclusive and abusive behavior (whether physical, verbal or indirect)? Has the camp trained its counselors to build “inclusive bunks” and to model positive behavior? And most important, does the staff know how to stop a bullying problem immediately, before it gets any worse? Get all the facts!

Is your child a likely target?: Has your child been bullied before? If so, call the camp and tell them that. Let them know — confidentially — that your son or daughter is vulnerable to being targeted; and ask them to watch for signs that your child is being excluded or teased. Pick a point-person on the camp staff to discus this with, and always do follow-up!

Talk to your child: Kids get picked on for a variety of reasons (maybe he or she is the “new kid in the bunk”; or short, or shy, or not into sports, or even of a different race); and your child needs to know that if any of this leads to bullying, getting angry or showing emotion (crying, for example) only fuels the bullies, and can increase the degree and frequency of the abuse. Role-play with your child. Teach him the skills to maintain his composure and self-esteem. Make sure she feels confident about being assertive before she leaves for camp. A little bit of self-assurance goes a long way.

Make a plan together: Tell your child that if he or she feels unsafe at any time during the summer, to tell a counselor about it immediately. And if that doesn’t get results, the child must go to another adult, team leader or even the camp director — and keep going back until the problem is addressed. Explain to your child that it’s okay to be persistent until the problem is resolved.

Cyberbullying: Most camps have a no-cell phone policy (blocking the Internet in their computer areas for example), but many parents want to keep in contact with their kids over the summer — so sometimes, a handheld device slips through. But this sends all the wrong messages. Parents should understand that, in many instances, a cell phone opens the door for cyberbullying, and that they must adhere to the camp’s no-cell policy. Just like during the off-seasons, parents and kids need to forge an ongoing partnership to prevent cyberbullying.

“The fundamental rule on bullying is the same at camp as it is at home,” Dr. Haber told me in a telephone interview. “We need to teach our kids new skills, and help them develop positive attitudes and behavior. And my message to the camps themselves is to teach staff ‘inclusiveness,’ and to train counselors to create inclusive bunks.”

Dr. Haber told me that when kids don’t believe an adult will intervene, bullies will test their power over others, and the kids being bullied won’t speak up. That’s why it’s vital that parents take concrete steps to help protect their kids.

As I wrote here back in May, our national conversation on bullying is a crucial one, and we’ll continue to stay focused on the issue throughout the year, so that kids everywhere — and their parents — can put an end to bullying once and for all.

Because we must.

Joel Haber, Ph. D. is a clinical psychologist, consultant for the American Camp Association, nationally recognized parenting expert, and the author of the internationally acclaimed, Bullyproof Your Child for Life: Protect Your Child from Teasing, Taunting and Bullying for Good,” He is the recipient of five parenting awards for his “Tool Kits for Kids.”

The bullying experienced by Nathan Dowden over the past two years has been so extreme it required investigation by the London Police Service.

Nathan, now 11, was a Grade 4 Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) student, when a boy forced his scrotum into Nathan’s mouth. A separate incident involved another child forcing Nathan to touch his penis.

Nathan doesn’t hate the boys who have bullied and abused him; however, he does hope they get some help.

“I am mad at them, I don’t hate them though. I would like them to get help,” Nathan said. “It was tough going to school, not knowing what was going to happen next. The support I got has helped.

“But I agree with my mom, they (the bullies) need help too.”

Providing support for the bully is one of the things Anne Dowden, Nathan’s mom, said was missing from the recently unveiled TVDSB Director’s Community Task for on Anti-Bullying. That missing component is just one reason Dowden says she believes the report won’t make a tangible difference.

“I don’t have any expectations this report will make a difference,” Dowden said. “It’s been a living nightmare. It’s been exhausting. We have lived and breathed it. And Nathan is a happy-go-lucky kid, thank God, but that doesn’t mean it is okay. People say he is OK, but he’s not. It is damaging him.”

The people Dowden refers to include members of the TVDSB that she says simply haven’t understood the severity of what her son has had to deal with. She says one board official even went so far as to ask her what was wrong with her son that he would be bullied so often.

Another incident with her son’s principal left her further dumbfounded.

“I’d have to be on him, ‘Did you call the police? Did you suspend these kids?’ When the one boy put Nathan’s hand on his privates, he said to me, ‘Well Nathan seemed okay.’ I said to him that Nathan doesn’t even realize how wrong it is,” Dowden said. “It is the action that is being done, and not how the person is reacting to it. That has nothing to do with it and I’ve had to point that out several times.”

For his part, TVDSB director Bill Tucker said the board has always focused on consequences for bullies.

“Consequences, and consistency of consequences, is very important. Consequences, when I was a principal, would range from always a phone call to the parent, right up to suspension,” Tucker said.

“My experience has been that when students see consistency of consequences, that plays a significant role in reducing bullying. But as a board, we are not into punishment.”

Dowden says had it not been the support from the London Anti-Bullying Coalition (LABC), she would have long ago been at her wits end.

The coalition, perhaps ironically, was one of the 25 community agencies who were called together to help create the 2,000 suggestions contained in the 22-page report.

Corina Morrison, co-founder of the LABC alongside Kathryn Wilkins, said that while she believes the task force members were all committed to making the situation better, there is very little in the report to help ease the minds of parents – and children – currently dealing with bullying.

“At the end of the day that report makes no difference. There was a lot of talk. There were a lot of partnerships made, which is fabulous. But for those kids who are home, afraid to go to school, that report means nothing,” Morrison said.

“I want to be hopefully optimistic that there will be some changes coming from all this. The parents though who’ve read the report, and emailed me about it, are not happy with it. There are no immediate solutions. The report doesn’t go into enough detail.”

Tucker said he believes the report not only provides details on how the community must pull together to stop bullying, but also offers more than just lip service to the actions he says must be taken.

“I think it superseded any expectations I had. Not only does it reflect current initiatives, but it has also been a springboard for new initiatives,” Tucker said. “The fact the three Children’s Aid societies from across the region got together for a unified response is an innovative approach. Our report… reinforced the value of community police officers in our secondary schools. I think it has been a great springboard for new initiatives, long-term initiatives.”

As someone looking for more immediate solutions, Dowden says greater attention needs to be paid to the one group she says is not addressed in the report, the bully.

“I saw Bill Tucker on the news, talking about the bystanders. And in a lot of my experiences they are talking about the victim. But where is the bully in all this?” Dowden said.

“These bullies who are suspended, they need the help they aren’t getting. There is too much focus on everyone except the bully and those kids are crying for help.”

It is a point Morrison is quick to agree with.

“We keep talking about, especially for the elementary kids, there should be something in place at the school to wrap around the bully. If they need anger management, get them anger management,” Morrison said. “That is where all these different community stakeholders can come into play.

“Our teachers just want to teach, and should teach. So if there is another community organization they can refer children to, then all the better.”

Tucker says one key group that has to be brought onboard any anti-bullying effort must be the parents of children who exhibit bullying behaviour.

“We need to get parents of the bully on board. There has to be a recognition that bullying behaviour is a learned behaviour, and can be changed,” Tucker said.

“I have heard some people say we will never eliminate bullying, but my approach is we aren’t going to eliminate some bullying in some places. I believe the goal has to be eliminating all bullying in all places.”

If you truly want to help a victim of bullying you need to help the bully first.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” ~ Isaac Newton

Imagine you were mugged one night coming home late. Would you ever go near that area again? Probably not. Would you start doing things and carrying things to protect yourself? You bet! For example, how would you react if a stranger approached you to ask you a question on the street? Your answers to these questions all revolve around the same idea – you have changed your outlook on life in order to protect yourself from another incident occurring.

For every action there is a reaction – consciously or otherwise. What all of this boils down to is that actions that affect us on an emotional level cause us to make a shift in our thinking, temporarily or permanently, depending on the level of emotions you feel.

Children’s personalities are shaped by emotional events created by their environment, just like ours are. If there are aspects of your children’s personalities that you believe will have a negative impact on their lives in the future you can be certain that they were shaped by some emotional events or traumatic times in their lives.

But what’s vastly more important than where their behaviour came from is what you can do to change it. There is no point in assigning blame; it will do nothing for your children and will only waste your emotional energy. You can’t avoid emotional events in your children’s lives. They are inevitable. But what you can do is ‘debrief’ with them on their day’s events so that you can help them understand things in a more positive way. I call this ‘future preventative maintenance’.

The important thing to note is that everyone can change. I once heard someone say ‘the past is who you were, the present is who you are, and the future will determine who you will be’. What I mean by this is that anyone can change at anytime in their life, your present doesn’t necessarily determine your future. That’s why I don’t believe in the phrase ‘once a bully, always a bully’.

Here is the key to changing a child’s bullying behaviour. Deep inside, bullies feel that interacting with others through bullying is far less painful than interacting with them as themselves. To break it down further, it is far less painful to be known as a bully because the bully controls how others view him/her as opposed to the pain which might be experienced if people don’t like him/her for who he/she really is.

As a parent, guardian or counselor you can use this supposition as leverage to help bullies change their behaviour. They currently link greater pain to being themselves than to being a bully. You can use this knowledge one of two ways. You can help them link greater pain to bulling others than being nice to them. The other option is to get them to equate a larger amount of pleasure or happiness to being themselves than being a bully. This will also build self-esteem like crazy! If the amount of happiness is sufficient it will outweigh the pain factors driving them to bully.

So what can you do to ‘turn up the pain factor’ for bullying? Well, most bullies want attention. That’s why they are willing to put up with the negative feedback. Take away their purpose for acting the way they do and all that will be left is the habitual behaviour.

How can you use the ‘happiness factor’ to change their behaviour? The most effective way to curb bullying is to introduce the bullies to positive peer groups. But here’s the issue – what positive peer group wants to have someone around who is a bully? We end up with the chicken and the egg scenario. So the question becomes how do you change the bullies’ behaviour enough to have a peer group want to have them around? Give them praise when they are genuine and they do something self-less or kind. Note positive changes in their behaviour and reward them for it.

There are many ways to get a bully to stop his/her behaviour and our programs and books have some wonderful solutions. Every solution available works off of the pain/pleasure philosophy in some way. If you keep this philosophy at the forefront of your mind when dealing with the child your results will increase dramatically.

About Author

Stuart McConnell has been an educator for the past 8 years teaching a wide range of ages from elementary to college. Stuart is currently the founder and president of 2 education based companies: PepperPot Media for corporate training and Casreep Communications for elementary and secondary school resources.

By DAN BARRY

All lank and bone, the boy stands at the corner with his younger sister, waiting for the yellow bus that takes them to their respective schools. He is Billy Wolfe, high school sophomore, struggling.

Moments earlier he left the sanctuary that is his home, passing those framed photographs of himself as a carefree child, back when he was 5. And now he is at the bus stop, wearing a baseball cap, vulnerable at 15.

A car the color of a school bus pulls up with a boy who tells his brother beside him that he’s going to beat up Billy Wolfe. While one records the assault with a cellphone camera, the other walks up to the oblivious Billy and punches him hard enough to leave a fist-size welt on his forehead.

The video shows Billy staggering, then dropping his book bag to fight back, lanky arms flailing. But the screams of his sister stop things cold.

The aggressor heads to school, to show friends the video of his Billy moment, while Billy heads home, again. It’s not yet 8 in the morning.

Bullying is everywhere, including here in Fayetteville, a city of 60,000 with one of the country’s better school systems. A decade ago a Fayetteville student was mercilessly harassed and beaten for being gay. After a complaint was filed with the Office of Civil Rights, the district adopted procedures to promote tolerance and respect — none of which seems to have been of much comfort to Billy Wolfe.

It remains unclear why Billy became a target at age 12; schoolyard anthropology can be so nuanced. Maybe because he was so tall, or wore glasses then, or has a learning disability that affects his reading comprehension. Or maybe some kids were just bored. Or angry.

Whatever the reason, addressing the bullying of Billy has become a second job for his parents: Curt, a senior data analyst, and Penney, the owner of an office-supply company. They have binders of school records and police reports, along with photos documenting the bruises and black eyes. They are well known to school officials, perhaps even too well known, but they make no apologies for being vigilant. They also reject any suggestion that they should move out of the district because of this.

The many incidents seem to blur together into one protracted assault. When Billy attaches a bully’s name to one beating, his mother corrects him. “That was Benny, sweetie,” she says. “That was in the eighth grade.”

It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up.

Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School.

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Things got worse. At Woodland Junior High School, some boys in a wood shop class goaded a bigger boy into believing that Billy had been talking trash about his mother. Billy, busy building a miniature house, didn’t see it coming: the boy hit him so hard in the left cheek that he briefly lost consciousness.

Ms. Wolfe remembers the family dentist sewing up the inside of Billy’s cheek, and a school official refusing to call the police, saying it looked like Billy got what he deserved. Most of all, she remembers the sight of her son.

“He kept spitting blood out,” she says, the memory strong enough still to break her voice.

By now Billy feared school. Sometimes he was doubled over with stress, asking his parents why. But it kept on coming.

In ninth grade, a couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

According to Alan Wilbourn, a spokesman for the school district, the principal notified the parents of the students involved after Ms. Wolfe complained, and the parents — whom he described as “horrified” — took steps to have the page taken down.

Not long afterward, a student in Spanish class punched Billy so hard that when he came to, his braces were caught on the inside of his cheek.

So who is Billy Wolfe? Now 16, he likes the outdoors, racquetball and girls. For whatever reason — bullying, learning disabilities or lack of interest — his grades are poor. Some teachers think he’s a sweet kid; others think he is easily distracted, occasionally disruptive, even disrespectful. He has received a few suspensions for misbehavior, though none for bullying.

Judging by school records, at least one official seems to think Billy contributes to the trouble that swirls around him. For example, Billy and the boy who punched him at the bus stop had exchanged words and shoves a few days earlier.

But Ms. Wolfe scoffs at the notion that her son causes or deserves the beatings he receives. She wonders why Billy is the only one getting beaten up, and why school officials are so reluctant to punish bullies and report assaults to the police.

Mr. Wilbourn said federal law protected the privacy of students, so parents of a bullied child should not assume that disciplinary action had not been taken. He also said it was left to the discretion of staff members to determine if an incident required police notification.

The Wolfes are not satisfied. This month they sued one of the bullies “and other John Does,” and are considering another lawsuit against the Fayetteville School District. Their lawyer, D. Westbrook Doss Jr., said there was neither glee nor much monetary reward in suing teenagers, but a point had to be made: schoolchildren deserve to feel safe.

Billy Wolfe, for example, deserves to open his American history textbook and not find anti-Billy sentiments scrawled across the pages. But there they were, words so hurtful and foul.

The boy did what he could. “I’d put white-out on them,” he says. “And if the page didn’t have stuff to learn, I’d rip it out.”

By Irene van der Zande, Kidpower Executive Director

Bullying prevention skills are best learned through hands-on practice. The Kidpower approach is to use People Safety skills to help our students rehearse how to handle different problems such as bullying. The key is to coach students in a positive step-by-step fashion rather than making this a test. Here are some practices you can work on with the young people in your life.

1. Walking with Awareness, Calm, and Confidence

People are less likely to be picked on if they walk and sit with awareness, calm and confidence. Awareness, calm and confidence means keeping one’s head up, back straight, taking assertive steps, looking around, having a peaceful face and body, and moving away from people who might cause trouble.

Show your child the difference between being passive, aggressive and assertive in body language, tone of voice and choice of words. Have your child walk across the floor, coaching her or him to be successful, by saying for example; “That’s great!” “Now take bigger steps”, “Look around you” “Straighten your back.” etc.

2. Leaving in a Powerful, Positive Way

The best self-defense tactic is called “target denial,” which means “don’t be there.” Act out a scenario where maybe your child is walking in the school corridor (or any other place where he or she might bullied). You can pretend to be a bully standing by the wall saying mean things. Ask your child what these mean things might be because what is considered insulting or upsetting is different for different people, times, and places.

Coach your child to veer around the bully in order to move out of reach. Remind your child to leave with awareness, calm and confidence, glancing back to see where the bully is. Let your child practicing saying something neutral in a normal tone of voice like “See you later!” or “Have a nice day!” while calmly and confidently moving away. Point out that stepping out of line or changing seats is often the safest choice.

3. Setting a Boundary

If a bully is following or threatening your child in a situation where she or he cannot just leave, your child needs to be able to set a clear boundary.

Pretend to poke your child in the back (do this very gently; the idea is not to be hurtful). Coach your child to turn, stand up tall, put his or her hands up in front of the body like a fence, palms out and open, and say “Stop!”.

Coach your child to have a calm but clear voice and polite firm words- not whiney and not aggressive. Show how to do it and praise your child for trying -even though she or he does not get it right to begin with. Realize that this might be very hard and triggering for your child (and maybe for you too).

Children need support to learn these skills. The idea is that your child takes charge of his or her space by moving away and, if need be, setting boundaries as soon as a problem is about to start – so that your child doesn’t wait until the bullying is already happening.

4. Using Your Voice

If your child does get into a situation where somebody is trying to push or hit or knuckle her or his head, you could practice by holding your child gently and acting as if you are going to do the action gently. Coach your child to pull away and yell NO! really loudly. Coach him or her to say “STOP! I don’t like that!” Coach your child to look the bully in the eyes and speak in a firm voice with both hands up and in front like a fence. Teach your child to leave and go to an adult for help.

5. Protecting Your Feelings From Name-Calling

Schools, youth groups, and families should create harassment-free zones just as workplaces should. However, you can teach children how to protect themselves from insults. Tell your child that saying something mean back makes the problem bigger, not better.

One way to take the power out of hurting words by is saying them out loud and imagining throwing them away. Doing this physically and out loud at home will help a child to do this in his or her imagination at school.

Help your child practice throwing the mean things that other people are saying into a trash can. Have your child then say something positive out loud to himself or herself to take in. For example, if someone says, “I don’t like you, ” you can throw those words away and say, “I like myself.” If someone says, “You are stupid” you can throw those words away and say, “I’m smart.” If someone says, “I don’t want to play with you” then you can throw those words away and say, “I will find another friend.”

6. Speaking Up for Inclusion

Being left out is a major form of bullying. Exclusion should be clearly against the rules at school. A child can practice persisting in asking to join a game.

Pretend to be a bully who wants to exclude.

Have your child walk up and say, “I want to play.” Coach your child to sound and look positive and friendly, not whiny or aggressive.

Ask your child the reasons that kids give for excluding him or her. Use those reasons so your child can practice persisting. For example, if the reason is, “You’re not good enough,” your child can practice saying “I’ll get better if I practice!” If the reason is, “There are too many already,” your child might practice saying, “There’s always room for one more.” If the reason is, “You cheated last time,” your child might practice saying, “I did not understand the rules. Let’s make sure we agree on the rules this time.”

7. Being Persistent in Getting Help

Children who are being bullied need to be able to tell teachers, parents, and other adults in charge what is happening in the moment clearly and calmly and persistently even if these adults are very distracted or rude – and even if asking for help has not worked before. Learning how to have polite firm words, body language and tone of voice even under pressure and to not give up when asking for help is a life-long skill.

We have found that practice is helpful for both children and adults in learning how to persist and get help when you need it. Here is one you can do with your child.

Pretend to be a teacher or someone else who your child might expect help and support from. Tell your child who you are pretending to be and where you might be at school. Have your child start saying in a clear calm voice, “Excuse me I have a safety problem.”

You pretend to be busy and just ignore your child! Coach him or her to keep going and say: “Excuse me, I really need your help.”

Act irritated and impatient and say, “Yes. what is it now?” and keep being busy.

Coach your child to say something specific like, “The girls over there are calling me names and not letting me play with them. I have told them I don’t like being called names and that I want to play but they won’t listen. ” or “Those boys keep coming up and pushing me. I have tried to stay away from them but they keep coming up to me and won’t leave me alone.” At school, teachers want children to try to solve their problems first. However, adult intervention is needed if this does not work.

You say: “That’s nice!” as if you heard but did not actually listen. This is very common for busy adults.

Coach your child to touch your arm and keep going “Please, to listen to me this is important”. Now you get irritated and say “Can’t you see I’m busy!?”

Tell your child that sometimes adults get angry and don’t understand but not to give up in asking for help and to say the specific problem again: “I do not feel safe here because (state specific problem again) ______________.”

You minimize and say: “What’s the big deal? Just stay away from them.”

Coach your child to persistent and say again, “Having this happen is making me feel bad about going to school. Please, I really need you to listen.”

Now change your demeanor so that your child can see you are listening and understanding and say “Oh! I am sorry I yelled at you and I am glad you are telling me. Tell me more and we will figure out what to do.”

Remind your child that, if the adult still does not listen, it is not his or her fault, but to keep asking until someone does something to fix the problem. Tell your child to please always tell you whenever she or he has a problem with anyone anywhere anytime. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of adults to create safe environments for the children in their lives and to be good role-models for our children by acting as their advocates in powerful respectful ways.

8. Using Physical Self-Defense as a Last Resort

Children need to know when they have the right to hurt someone to stop that person from hurting them. At Kidpower, we teach that fighting is a last resort – when you are about to be harmed and you cannot leave or get help.

However, bullying problems are often not as clear-cut as other personal safety issues. Families have different rules about where they draw the line. Schools will often punish a child who fights back unless parents warn the school in writing ahead of time that, since the school has not protected their children, they will back their children up if they have to fight.

Learning physical self defense helps most children become more confident, even if they never have to use these skills in a real-life situation. Just being more confident helps children to avoid being chosen as a victim most of the time. There are different self defense techniques for bullying than for more dangerous situations — let your child practice a self defense move like kicking someone in the shins, pinching someone’s leg or upper arm, or hitting someone in the chest. You can practice in the air or by holding a sofa cushion. Consider sending your child to a class like Kidpower.

Note: This article is an excerpt from The KIDPOWER Book for Caring Adults: Personal Safety, Self-Protection, Confidence, and Advocacy for Young People, which includes step-by-step explanations of how to practice the skills mentioned as well as over 100 pages about the underlying issues that need to be addressed, stories, and how to use People Safety skills to prevent and stop most bullying.

Other Articles of Interest

Bullying at School ~ Seven Solutions for Parents

Bullying Prevention ~ Eight Effective Actions Adults Can Take

How to Pick a Good Self-Defense Program

Bullying ~ What Do Kids Say?

By Andrea Cohn & Andrea Canter, Ph.D., NCSP
National Association of School Psychologists

Bullying is a widespread problem in our schools and communities. The behavior encompasses physical aggression, threats, teasing, and harassment. Although it can lead to violence, bullying typically is not categorized with more serious forms of school violence involving weapons, vandalism, or physical harm.  It is, however, an unacceptable anti-social behavior that is learned through influences in the environment, e.g., home, school, peer groups, even the media.  As such, it also can be unlearned or, better yet, prevented.

A bully is someone who directs physical, verbal, or psychological aggression or harassment toward others, with the goal of gaining power over or dominating another individual.  Research indicates that bullying is more prevalent in boys than girls, though this difference decreases when considering indirect aggression (such as verbal threats).

A victim is someone who repeatedly is exposed to aggression from peers in the form of physical attacks, verbal assaults, or psychological abuse. Victims are more likely to be boys and to be physically weaker than peers. They generally do not have many, if any, good friends and may display poor social skills and academic difficulties in school.

Why Do Some Children and Adolescents Become Bullies?

Facts About Bullying

• Bullying is the most common form of violence in our society; between 15% and 30% of students are bullies or victims.
• A recent report from the American Medical Association on a study of over 15,000 6th-10th graders estimates that approximately 3.7 million youths engage in, and more than 3.2 million are victims of, moderate or serious bullying each year.
• Between 1994 and 1999, there were 253 violent deaths in school, 51 casualties were the result of multiple death events.  Bullying is often a factor in school related deaths.
• Membership in either bully or victim groups is associated with school drop out, poor psychosocial adjustment, criminal activity and other negative long-term consequences.
• Direct, physical bullying increases in elementary school, peaks in middle school and declines in high school.  Verbal abuse, on the other hand, remains constant.  The U.S. Department of Justice reports that younger students are more likely to be bullied than older students.
• Over two-thirds of students believe that schools respond poorly to bullying, with a high percentage of students believing that adult help is infrequent and ineffective.
• 25% of teachers see nothing wrong with bullying or putdowns and consequently intervene in only 4% of bullying incidents.

Why Do Some Children and Adolescents Become Bullies?

Most bullying behavior develops in response to multiple factors in the environment—at home, school and within the peer group. There is no one cause of bullying. Common contributing factors include:

• Family factors: The frequency and severity of bullying is related to the amount of adult supervision that children receive—bullying behavior is reinforced when it has no or inconsistent consequences. Additionally, children who observe parents and siblings exhibiting bullying behavior, or who are themselves victims, are likely to develop bullying behaviors. When children receive negative messages or physical punishment at home, they tend to develop negative self concepts and expectations, and may therefore attack before they are attacked—bullying others gives them a sense of power and importance.
• School factors: Because school personnel often ignore bullying, children can be reinforced for intimidating others. Bullying also thrives in an environment where students are more likely to receive negative feedback and negative attention than in a positive school climate that fosters respect and sets high standards for interpersonal behavior.
• Peer group factors: Children may interact in a school or neighborhood peer group that advocates, supports, or promotes bullying behavior. Some children may bully peers in an effort to “fit in,” even though they may be uncomfortable with the behavior.

Why Do Some Children and Adolescents Become Victims?

One way to stop bullying is to take steps to prevent bullying from starting. Some ways to prevent bullying is through providing a bully policy, consequences for bullies, and educating potential victims of bullying. Keep reading for more tips on preventing bullying.

Steps to prevent bullying before it starts can address the problem from several directions. Prevention can be aimed at creating a situation in which bullying is not tolerated, in giving potential bullies outlets and behavior suggestions so that thoughts and feelings that could end up in bullying are channeled in different ways, and in helping potential victims avoid becoming the victim of bullying behavior. This article explores some of the current thoughts about how bullying can be prevented.

Prevent Bullying With Policies

A clear definition of bullying and a policy that disallows it and lays out the consequences is one means to arm a school or school district against this problem. For one thing, when bullying is clearly defined, then it can be more easily recognized and separated from constructive criticism, discipline, and motivation, all of which are bordering areas. It is important that the policy be clear and research-based in order to not be so broad that students and teachers are fearful of being perceived as bullies at every turn when what they say is not praise. And it is different, though still potentially painful, if a child is picked last for games because he or she has an objectively poor skill set as opposed to being picked last due to an explicit campaign to ostracize him or her.

Policies to prevent bullying may explicitly mention major types of bullying, including verbal, social, physical, pack and cyberbullying, and racist, religious, homophobic bullying, along with bullying of people with disabilities. But it is important that policies should be worded so as not to exclude the bullying of mainstream victims, nor victims who are teachers, staff, administrators, or school board members, rather than students.

As of September, 2009, most states have bullying laws. Bullying laws do not exist, however, in Alabama, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Prevent Bullying With Consequences

With a carefully written and precise bullying definition in place, there is a need to follow up with appropriate and fair consequences when bullying occurs, whomever the perpetrator and victims are. Victims must know that they will get a fair hearing in order to be persuaded to come forward. Bullies must not be perceived as immune on account of longevity or position. Consequences need to be applied consistently in order for a policy to prevent bullying to be effective.

In states in which there are bullying laws and the bullying involves physical altercations or damage to or theft of property, the consequences of bullying may include criminal prosecution, as well as school sanctions. In addition, bullies, both students and teachers, not to mention schools, school districts, and parents of bullies have been sued for damages.

Prevent Bullying with Family Education

Perception of bullying has changed over time, and while a bullying policy can touch organizations such as schools, it is harder to reach families. People who come from families in which bullying was the norm have been exposed to behavior models that are not considered acceptable today. These people, whether teachers or students, may need explicit models of how to act on thoughts and feelings that could lead to bullying and/or they may need greater assistance to learn new behavior patterns and break old models, such as counseling, rather than simply punishment.

Community education is difficult and takes time: many people feel that what happens behind their closed front door is their business and is private and resent and reject suggestions for change. But if dad bullies mom, or vice versa, and the children take this behavior as a model, what’s behind closed doors can flow out into the community.

Within the home, parents can prevent bullying both by modeling alternative behaviors as well as explicitly pointing out behaviors that fall into the category of bullying and differentiating ways of acting and sharing behaviors that are acceptable within a family – in which people often know more about each other’s characteristics, faults and failings, for example, because of how space is shared rather than because someone has “outed” someone else – from what is acceptable in school and other public settings.

Other Means to Help Prevent Bullying

• Supervision and appropriate intervention can help stop bullying that is in progress.
• Teach appropriate assertiveness to those who are, or may be, targets of bullying.
• If the bullying is linked to something that can be changed – such as an article of clothing or a lack of skill or training in some area – discuss various responses with the person, including changing the behavior, by making a different choice or by working to improve in the area that is lacking if this is an appropriate response, or learning to assert his or her right to be different, if this is appropriate. For example, if a student is ridiculed because his or her desk or locker is a mess with things falling out of it, some assistance in creating and maintaining order could both be beneficial and remove the reason for the bullying. If, however, the student wants to continue to wear a Yankee baseball cap in Red Sox territory, a different approach will be needed to prevent bullying.
• Staff training can help make sure that the school (and state, if applicable) bullying policies are widely understood.
• Some bullying occurs at the rate of “almost every day” according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2007 data. Head off repeat offense by encouraging reports of bullying and making sure reports are dealt with expeditiously. A victim who has accepted another student’s derision as “jokes” up to a point, should be able to report the derision without feeling complicit or guilty for the bullying being ongoing.

Sources

stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov
nces.ed.gov
stopbullyingnow.com
youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu